1. Technical Field
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, systems, and products for generating evidence of web services transactions.
2. Description of the Related Art
The term “web services” refers to a standardized way of integrating web-based applications. Web services typically provide business services upon request through data communications in standardized formats called bindings. A binding is a specification of a data encoding method and a data communications protocol. The most common binding in use for web services is data encoding in XML according to the SOAP protocol and data communications with HTTP. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a request/response messaging protocol that supports passing structured and typed data using XML and extensions.
Unlike traditional client/server models, such as an HTTP server that provides HTML documents in response to requests from browser clients, web services are not concerned with display. Web services instead share business logic, data, and processes through a programmatic interface across a network. Web services applications interface with one another, not with users. Because all data communications among web services are carried out according to standardized bindings, Web services are not tied to any one operating system or programming language. A Java client running in a Windows™ platform can call web service operations written in Perl and running under Unix. A Windows application written in C++ can call operations in a web service implemented as a Java servlet.
As discussed above, web services typically provide business services upon request through data communications in standardized formats called bindings. Such business services are typically carried out through request/response protocols in which a client or intermediary requester transmits a request message to a web service requesting a particular service, and the web service provides a response in the form of a response message. Disputes may arise in such a business transaction carried out as a message exchange. A dispute may arise, for example, if a web service never receives a request or does not respond to a received request. In order to protect the interests of parties operating requestors and web services, it is desirable to generate and preserve some evidence of the requests and responses for dispute resolution. There is an ongoing need for generating evidence of web services transactions.